Issue 45 |💡Embracing Discomfort: The Surprising Key to Rewiring Your Brain for Success
Learning to lean Into hardship is a key to unlocking your potential.
IoNTELLIGENCE draws on neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy to help you achieve professional success, personal transformation, and lasting happiness.
🧠 The Big Idea: We need to develop the habit of doing things that we find demanding.
🔧 What To Do Next: Follow the 5 Rules®️ of strengthening your willpower muscle.
🔬 Go Deeper: Read “Can’t Hurt Me” and listen to Andrew Huberman explain the power of your brain’s Anterior Mid-Cingulate Cortex.
📖 Reading Time: 5 Minutes
I hate Monday nights. Let me be more specific: I hate the Ropes and Rowers class at my local gym on Mondays.
It’s not just the 45 minutes of nonstop HIIT workout, which is hard enough. The class culminates with 3 minutes on the rowing machine, where we go all out to see who can notch the best distance.
You can’t go through the motions at that moment. The numbers don’t lie. They will tell you - without ambiguity - whether you did your best and how it stacks up against everyone else. It’s a Mind F**k and a VO2 Max Test every Monday.
Here’s the thing: I hate that training. But I love having done it. I bet some of you also have activities that are painful in the moment but profoundly satisfying once they’re accomplished. What makes this voluntary torture even more rewarding is that building my tolerance for suffering is not just character-building; it’s re-shaping my brain.
Scientists think they have found the seat of willpower, and it’s in a part of the brain called the Anterior Mid-Cingulate Cortex (AMCC). The good news? It’s something that you can train. It's more prominent in athletes, people who overcome adversity, and those who live long. Here’s why: neuroscientists have identified that this area only develops when facing challenges.
That’s the catch. You can’t enjoy the work. That’s why it works.
🚨 The Big Idea
I’m fascinated by the prospect of using neuroscientific insights to improve every aspect of our lives. I call this Neuro-Optimization, and this is an example of a recent discovery that helps us understand the keys to enhanced performance.
The AMCC is responsible for what neuro-psychologist Rick Hanson calls “effortful control: the deliberate and sustained regulation of thoughts and behaviors … Any time you consciously exercise your will, your AMCC is involved.” Just as important, it’s also strengthened by those intentional activities. This is why, for example, long-time practitioners of meditation have larger AMCCs than non-meditators. In other words, doing things that you find demanding changes your brain.
I realize that this is not an inviting message. We live in a world where comfort has become a common luxury, and the notion that we should willingly embrace hardship is a hard sell.
However, everyone from Aristotle to Andrew Huberman teaches us that the path to meaningful happiness - deep, earned satisfaction - is found on the other side of effort.
This is the paradox of personal and professional growth: we seek enjoyment but thrive without it.
🔧 What To Do Next: the 5 Rules®️
1. Commit to 5 Minutes at first.
We should get into the habit of consistently doing things we don’t naturally enjoy. One way is to set micro-goals that you are confident you can achieve. Hate going to the gym? Just commit to sticking your head in for five minutes. More than half the battle is getting there, and you’ll likely stay longer since you went all that way. Trick yourself into doing more by initially setting the bar low.
2. Flip the script.
Former Navy SEAL and professional hardman Jocko Willink has a counterintuitive way of dealing with problems. Whenever he faces a challenge, he says, “Good.”
The boss didn’t give me the promotion that I wanted. Good. That gives me more motivation to prove them wrong.
I didn’t make the varsity hockey team. Good. I suddenly have more time to get better.
Simply by saying the word, you reclaim control over the circumstances. You recast a negative situation into an eventual positive outcome. Moreover, you are simultaneously practicing the Jedi mind trick of dispassionately noting a setback while developing the willpower muscle to overcome it.
Some might think this only works for Huberman Bros who get fired up by SEAL Team Six battle cries, but you’d be wrong. I love this reframe for one reason: it works. I wrote a whole post on this, but here is the TL: DR version: a positive mindset is productive.
3. Do tough things regularly.
Author Michael Easter says that “one hard workout a week is the sweet spot for health and performance … More than that, we tend to get burned out and beaten down. Less than that, and we miss out on some health and performance upsides.”
He advocates pushing yourself physically weekly to achieve optimal growth and recovery. While your body has some hard limitations, your brain is more flexible. Business writer Brian Tracy—of “Eat the Frog” fame—argues that we should start each day with our most challenging task. You can work yourself up to that tempo, but Tracy is on to something: this approach shouldn’t be limited to exercise and fitness.
4. Apply this mindset to all actions you’ve been avoiding.
We all procrastinate, but dodging the short-term discomfort only prolongs the pain we will eventually have to bear.
Silicon Valley sage Naval Ravikant points out that “most of our suffering comes from avoidance. Most of the suffering from a cold shower is the tiptoeing your way in. Once you’re in, you’re in. It’s not suffering. It’s just cold.”
This insight applies to all sorts of challenges beyond the physical. Are you facing a tough decision right now? I’ll bet you know what you should do; you just don’t want to do it. Maybe you dread a difficult conversation with a colleague, but those discussions don’t always become confrontations. The point is that the fear of something is almost always worse than the reality of it.
This strategy of sitting with pain can be such a powerful unlock. It teaches you that physical or psychological discomfort is something you can endure and even embrace.
5. Change when it gets easy.
Building up the AMCC requires consistently doing hard things one doesn't want to do. This means you must hunt for a new challenge when something becomes fun. You have to chase the suck, in other words. Why is this so important? Because the AMCC doesn’t only grow in struggle. It shrinks in comfort.
This is the neurological confirmation of something I remind myself almost every day: we’re either getting better, or we’re getting worse. There’s no such thing as standing still.
🏆 Key Takeaways
The IoNTELLIGENCE 5 Rules®️ of Cultivating Willpower: Commit to 5 Minutes at first. Flip the script. Do tough things regularly. Apply this mindset to all actions you’ve been avoiding. Change when it gets easy.
🔬 Go Deeper
If you have a few hours, 📖 “Can’t Hurt Me” by David Goggins. This book is so popular in some crowds that it spawned a verb: you’ll hear people say they will “Goggins” it when wanting to overcome a big challenge. His eagerness to embrace hardship is not for everyone, but listening to his message will change how you perceive everyday adversity.
If you have one hour, 🎧 to this podcast interview between Dr. Peter Attia and Michael Easter discussing his book, “The Comfort Crisis.”
If you have 10 minutes, 👓 this YouTube Clip, in which Andrew Huberman explains how the Anterior Mid-Cingulate Cortex (AMCC) part of the brain only grows through struggle.